I also don’t like the distinction between human and animal. We happen to belong to a species that has really big cerebral cortices, and we have a society that has this structure where certain things are expected, etc. I don’t think it’s deeper than that. When someone doesn’t fit these expectations, I don’t think it’s right (meaning accurate, not a moral question) to call them not human.

Now, I think this post got off from the question. I do not think the post focused on what it is to be human. Although it does focus on an interesting philosophical discussion (that I can appreciate because of my big cerebral cortex).

Before I start yabbering, I would like to take issue with the person that said ‘It doesnt matter if I kil myself’ or words to that effect. Thats not strictly true from a wider prospective, although it may be literaqlly true. My father was a murder victim. He was killed by a shotgun blast, straight through his head. Think about te next time you say ‘Shoot me in the face’. Ive seen it, its not pretty. The murderer was someone in the family. It doesnt matter who it was actually, but it turned out to be my father. If you can tell me that the senseless murder of your parent, or anyone else you may love or cherish, doesnt impact you, then I submit you arent human at all. If you turn that 180 degrees, if you were to kill yourself, you would similarly have to be dumb, blind or other to not realize the impact that has on others.

But as far as being human, I see a common idea reappearing in many of the essays. She calls herself a ‘warrior’, struggle is a common theme, as is self activation, self interest and self awareness. ‘How to Fight’ is part and parcel of this, but in being human, the choice must be made when to fight, and why. Humans fight and animals fight, but the similarities stop there. Fighting is a risk, a risk of self harm and possibly death, so why would you ever do such a thing? ‘I was drunk’ or ‘I was jealous’ or ‘The goddamned kid spiled grapejuice on the wite rug’ (WTF are you doing with children, a pet and a white rug?!?) arent reasons that qualify as human ones. Yes, they are all too human, but thats not what were talking about. Short form is, shit isnt going down in my perceptual area without my direct and immediate involvement. ‘Woman murdered/raped in front of 20 bystanders’ isnt something that will EVER go on in my zipcode. Maybe thats the ‘man’ part of human, biologically I am expendible, so I damn well better bring something to the table. One time, someone tried to commit rape in my neighborhood. Ill spare the details, but the young lady and the 4 guys went to the hospital and
I went back to my apartment to drink a beer.

Being human is being willing to fight for the things that make us human, rather than animals. Being a witness to a purse snatching? Only if the guy in question ends up outrunning me. As a human, you have to carry a sense of whats right and whats wrong around with you at all times and an accurate idea of what you can and cannot do. But if you are human, there are some thimes you have to push all your chips to the middle of the table, regardless of odds.

Lemme tell you about my hero. To be honest, I dont know his name, but I am sure I could find it if I had to. But this guy lived in a bulding in an area of Portalnd ME called Munjoy Hill. All the buildings n the ‘Hill’ were old, and they caught fire with some frequency, and one night it happened to my hero. He had a wife and 5 children and he went through the house and made sure he had every single child out. As he was throwing his youngest child to safety from the second floor, the building collapsed on him and burned him to death. I personally cant think of a better way to go.

Thats my idea of a human, I guess.

Thoughs (mosly nitpicking) while reading the post:
- Opposable thumbs is one contributing factor for larger brains. Possibility to solve more complicated puzzles with more nimble fingers will develop the brain.
- Evolutionary luck? Brave statement. Need elaboration. I don’t think it’s luck that the ape with more nimble fingers were able to make more efficient spear and use it more efficiently and out-breed or kill the less talented ones. The idea of evolution is to make changes and weed out the weaker ones. Luck is a pretty tricky word to use because of all the intrepretations.
- I would refrase “humans are better than animals” to “humans are better than other animals” if you claim to be an atheist - therefore you most likely don’t believe in creationism of any sort. Or maybe you have another theory than evolution?
- Atheist, eh? How do you know god doesn’t exist? You have some sort of blind faith in non-existence of god?
- Our genes want to survive as much as the next animal’s. We can supress those urges, though. I wouldn’t put it as far as stating “survival instinct as well a desire to preserve and protect the rest of the world”. They should mean pretty much the same thing. A locust can’t comprehend it and its mates are killing an entire field. We can, so in order for us to survive, we shouldn’t do that. But look at the world, we are still fighting should we believe we have fouled up this world or not. We don’t really even try to save it.
- Just recently I read from the paper that a gorilla ran to a crying baby who fell in her cage in a zoo to comfort the baby. Caring about another species? Isn’t that human? Another one was when dolphins had guided a mother and a baby whale out of shallow water.
- Longer time ago I’ve read about cases where dolphins had just for the fun of it bitten several times a lost baby whale until it bleeds to death. Must be fun to watch someone die. And hey, cats are smart? Do you know any cat owner who denies that? Yet, they may play with the mouse for a long time before killing it. Just for the fun of it. (Oh, and don’t get me started on chimpanzees…)
- More more more? Like, say, a hunter-gatherer who don’t lose things anymore?

- A parasite? Now we are talking. Ok, good points start here. That part about consequences is exactly how I think how karma works. Not in any next-life bs. How you behave alters how others precieve you - and they act according to it. Hm.. should blog that some day… or perhaps I form a religion. Have to figure out if it is going to be a theist or non-theist -type. Since for the 1 of 3 results, I would have a fourth one. That’s gonna be a long one to explain. Invert side goodness. Not for the good of others, but yourself. As we are joined together. Even the Amish visit hardware store evey now and then. It would be optional for you to care about others for your (and yyour genes’) sake. Not for the other’s sake. Kinda the base for my belief-system. Get parasitic benefits, yet appear to be contributing. I don’t work as a computer techie because I want that people can work better and can give to their companies. For me computers are toys. I don’t really enjoy sudoku, but gimme a server that is broken. Now that’s a puzzle I like to solve. I play with toys, and the fools pay me money for it.

Now we enter the world of politics. One truth may be: Bank loans made dollar fall? But isn’t dollar privately owned and sold to the government? And the government uses the taxes to pay the interest of that loan. The fact that even though they blamed Afganistan for those Saudi terrorists and they attacked Iraq because of that was actually quite accurate. Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. We call them euros. 2001 he started to accept euros for oil. Surprisingly enough the rate that used to be 70 US cents for 1 euro, is now something like $1.60 for €1. Also, the money that has been printed with no base during the time when every country has to trade oil in dollars may prove to be the bubble. When some other countries start to deal with euros, others will get them, too. Dollars are streaming back and US has to pay for them. It has been even so bad that US was thinking about putting extra tax on imports from China. Yeah, piss off a country who has about 1.4 Trillion dollars just laying around… Does “flooding the markets” mean anything? Three best business in the world are drugs, weapons and oil. Afganistan has never produced so much poppies before the troops came in. So that’s no problem. The war effort has taken so long, that squeezing with war industry needs something else. People can’t handle squeesing more with weapons costs. Perhaps the third option?

But all in all very good writing. We mostly behave like parasites. Or locust. Or like Wachowski brothers wote, like viruses. Naw, more like locust. We consume everything we can around us, then expand our territory. But we start to run out of both things to consume and territory to expand. What makes us human? Religiously I would perhaps say “the ability to dream of god”. (I’m sure someone has already said that before me in some famous book I haven’t had the fortune to read.) Ability to do good and evil? No. Not really. Other animals can do that too. Maybe not in such extreme, but still. Ability for ultimate good while doing the ultimate evil? Not that one either. Why something extreme would make us humans? We are already on the “top of the foodchain”. And we have the largest brain. That should be enough extremes already.

I think the closest thing is that we have the ability to see we are destroying things around us for our temporary comfort, and it will destroy us eventually, but we keep on destroying and can in fact block our minds from it. No other animal is capapble of such complicated self-deception against everything we know and what feel in our insticts. Other animals just can’t do it.

My best friend lives on the same street as Heather Armstrong. She didn’t know who she was until she recognized her neighborhood and her neighbor on some TV show.

It’s sad when hard-working, honest people have real jobs to pay their mortgage and white-trash like the woman from Dooce.com can pay for a $700,000 house

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2160+E+900,
+Salt+Lake+City,+Utah+84108&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=24.514195,59.414063&ie=UTF8&ll=40.752621,-111.828761&spn=0.011411,0.029011&t=h&z=15&iwloc=addr

just by writing for 20 minutes a day about her boring life.

I get that ads on websites help pay the bills but what gets me is that she seems to capitalize on other people’s problems or get sympathy because so many people dislike her. Shouldn’t she at least give some of her earnings to charity or find a way to give back to her readers?

She tends to call a spade a spade, not a teaspoon. So, IMO if she wanted to say we were animals because we didn’t support her fund raising scheme, she would have said so very plainly. Instead, she apologized for not being a better motivator. Personally, I think the fact she raised several thousand dollars for a good cause is a positive thing. Failure to reach an artificial goal is not a true failure, perhaps more indicative of an unrealistic goal.

What I see is a woman who tends to write what is on her mind at a given moment. Her mind is active and wanders all over the universe.

So, I think she wrote what she did is because it was on her mind. Yes, perhaps as a result of the fund raiser, but not limited to the fund raiser.

I, for one, do not think anyone is every obliged to do anything for others. Most people want to but that is personal choice. Right now, I am funding a university diploma for a young niece in Third World rural Mexico. For the price of a good used mini-pickup, an ambitious young woman will be the first graduate from college in the history of her direct ancestry, as I was the first college graduate in the history of my direct ancestry in 1980.

She works hard. She is ambitious, unlike her sister who is far more intelligent. She wants more out of life than cooking; scrubbing; cleaning for a quarry worker. I chose to fund her advanced education because I was curious if she could make it. I did not feel obliged at all to do it. I wanted to do it. I don’t even really care much if she drops out and gets married. What I am paying for is an opportunity she would otherwise not have. What she does with it is up to her.

I find it fascinating that many people who think anyone who knows a kid is being abused and does nothing about it is an animal, also hate a president who decided to take out a fiend who killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, including kids, and whose sons had a bad habit of raping attractive little girls they see in the streets. Just because they don’t think he was a threat to US.

There’s the descriptive definition of “Humanity,” which defines us as categorically apart from all animals - oblivious to the fact that this system is enormously biased, since we’re the ones who made it. Famously, humans were defined as “rational animals” (specifically for our meta-cognition, thinking about thinking) instead of “featherless bipeds,” which defines us just as adequately without the whole high-and-mighty-king-of-the-jungle vibe you get from the other definition. Honestly, I think the best descriptive definition of humanity is as the “categorizing animal” since we’re the ones putting all God’s creatures in separate boxes, the rest of creation is too busy living.

There’s also the normative definition of “Humanity,” which is the way in which something is seen as ‘humanitarian’ or ‘inhumane’ or just plain ‘inhuman’. This use implicitly claims we have are distinct from all animals because we have the greatest capacity for mercy. While some animals, herbivores especially, are capable of living without harming other living creatures, it’s a stretch to say that any creature can have compassion for something that’s trying to eat it. While, admittedly, only the greatest humanitarians can make the claim of truly loving their assailants, they are people from whom entire religions are founded, precisely because they make ‘being human’ seem like a worthy cause and not merely an incurable condition.

I think the wisest definition of what it means to be human is a loose one, observing the fact that we can match the depravity of any animal, but also rise above whatever boundaries we once imagined ourselves having. The definition of human is somewhere between a god and a roach. I know that’s not very precise, it includes all sorts of housepets for example, but considering how much easier it is for most people to sympathize with their pets than strangers, I’m quite alright with it.

And to answer your question of who’s to blame: it’s anyone and everyone placing blame instead of accepting the problem; blame will never suture a wound or lull a crying infant to sleep, healing begins at the end of blame.